the best descriptions of childhood religious education in the last 50 years – is Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood . Although she is an infamously unreliable narrator, McCarthy’s stories of growing up an orphan, spending time with her Christian, Jewish, and Catholic relatives, and attending parochial school are at once mundane and deeply compelling. Which kind of sums up what it’s like to go to religious school. No matter how out-of-the- mainstream some of these schools’ mundane activities might be (Bible memorization contests or prayers at the start of class), taken together, religious schools give each new generation of children the same opportunity to practice faith – and a little skepticism – in a compelling way. Christine Rosen is managing editor of The Weekly Standard . She is a senior editor of The New Atlantis . She is A RELIGIOUS EDUCATION THE UNEXPECTED UPSIDE OF... working on her forthcoming book, The Extinction of Experience , to be published byW.W. Norton. Her past books include Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement and My Fundamentalist Education . Ms. Rosen’s essays and reviews have appeared in publications such as The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, The American Historical Review, and The New England Journal of Medicine.
mind – “Gone Maggie Gone” – where Lisa Simpson stumbles upon a parochial school classroom where the nun-teacher is singing, “ If you’re happy and you know it, that’s a sin ” to a room full of children. Rather, there was a firm belief among students at my school that we must serve as a bulwark against the harmful, rising tide of mainstream secular culture. This separation from the mainstream is often the legacy of a childhood religious education – thanks in large part to the memories it stirs up of a rich (and often richly absurd) alternative Christian universe, one with its own fashions, music, entertainment, and “celebrities.” (When I was growing up, it was Amy Grant and Stryper. Today it’s Zach Williams and MercyMe.) At my high school, for example, dancing was verboten. (It was “clothed fornication,” according to my Bible teacher.) So instead of school dances or proms, we had... banquets. True, the mood was more sedate than a typical prom, with modestly dressed students politely watching a slide show while a student musician played warmed-over versions of Christian rock songs. But it still felt like a special evening. We even attended the annual one-night Christian music festival at Disney World called “Night of Joy.” Today, people’s feelings about religious schools are rarely uncomplicated. Numerous memoirs have recounted the horrible experiences of people raised in observant religious households, forced to attend strict religious schools. One exception – and one of
We were crusaders for Christ, which meant we were focused on something bigger than ourselves – the perfect antidote to adolescent navel-gazing.
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